this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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The line has to go up.
The issue is that big companies have shareholders, and those shareholders don't demand that the company stay solvent, but that they achieve year-over-year growth. Even minimal growth like 2-3% over LY is considered a failure to most shareholder groups, depending on the size of the company. So eventually they have to squeeze every last drop out of the userbase/product to keep the line going up, so shareholders don't sell and bail.
Now, with Twitter there's a whole litany of poitical tin-foil hat theories I can shout out, but this isn't the place for it.
Reddit, Facebook, and Twitch: it's money.
Reddit is getting as much money as it can shored up with Venture Capital before it brings out it's Initial Public Offering (basically going public for people to buy stock in). High IPO, more perceived value, more space for advertisers, people are going to buy in. EDIT: I believe this is why they're making their API pricing so high (hence the whole current Reddit situation right now) so that they can get more ads viewed.
Facebook: I don't even know why people use FB, but im going to guess it's just ads.
Twitch: Again, Ad revenue. Slam as many first-party ads as you can so you get the money from advertisers. Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn't feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they're a bad thing, just using an example)
Everything comes down to the line. And it has to keep going up.
Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn’t feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they’re a bad thing, just using an example)>
Oh it totally is a bad thing. They show women in an oversexualized lewd context to a target audience that consists to signifact extent of children. Don't misunderstand this as moralism. I'm not coming from a conservative perspective that wants women to be all buttoned up or something. I'm just being critical of a company normalizing the objectification of women (or anyone) to children for the purpose of making money.
I may have worded it wrong (mainly because morning coffee takes forever to hit me). I meant to say that I don't think those hot-tub streamers are bad because of what they do, I just don't think they belong on Twitch.
Yep, it's this. Despite how it seemed in the 2010s investor capital is not free money. Investors want it paid back many multiple times over and they'll risk destroying the underlying product if necessary.
I hate how much of the entire internet experience is focused on ads, ads, ads. I go out of my way to block trackers so the ads often aren’t that relevant and really transparent. Buy, consume, give us your data, repeat. But what would the alternative look like?
Facebook: Mainly because of Facebook groups. They're pretty whacky, have a lot of fun normie non-degenerate drama, and a well moderated facebook group is more wholesome than any reddit sub in my experience.
It is relaxing to not have the hivemind like reddit or having users constantly one-up each other like twitter. Also wayyy less bot accounts in Facebook groups.
Although it is declining because of FB's shitty censors and bans, the group scenes are very much alive and fun.
Yep, i have Facebook for groups, events, and also local services.
Oh yeah I forgot about the Local Events and Services part. and Marketplace.
I don't think there is any replacement for FB in local event organisation. And with how crap google is rn, it is much easier to search facebook marketplace for local services and have a better outcome.
Mobilizon is an event organization site that is part of the Fediverse but the benefit of the corporate sites is widescale adoption.
TIL
That looks like a nice piece of tech, but you're right about the adoption part. Getting a minimally significant number of people to sign up for this in my country in gonna be a herculean effort
Surely wouldn't it be easier for them to just inject ads into the API and keep it cheap?
IF that's something they can do? I don't know. I don't know a thing about backend work on third-party programs.
There's a part of the that thinks Reddit is the same way and just went "Hell with it, use us or nothing at all" and nukes the whole API except for the big-rollers.
I wouldn't even know who would pay such a high price for that anyway, outside of advertisers and algorithm scrapers.
It is possible for them to return sponsored posts via the API.
Apps will request something like "Give me the first 100 posts from the subreddit /r/aww, using the sorting Hot". And then Reddit can return 95 actual posts with sponsored posts sprinkled in between every so often.